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Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Feb. 25th through Mar. 3rd

Welcome to The Moose Pond! The Welcomings posts give the Moose, old and new, a place to visit and share words about the weather, life, the world at large and the small parts of Moosylvania that we each inhabit.

Welcomings will be posted at the start of each week (every Sunday morning). To find the posts, just bookmark this link and Voila! (which is Moose for “I found everyone!!”).

The format is simple: each day, the first moose to arrive on-line will post a comment welcoming the new day and complaining (or bragging!) about their weather. Or mentioning an interesting or thought provoking news item. Or simply checking in.

So … what’s going on in your part of Moosylvania?

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NOTE: The comments page will now split off after 20 or so left margin comments with the most recent comments on the current page. To see the older comments, scroll to the bottom of the page and use the link.

So, the White House staff is in chaos, children are dying in schools, Flint doesn’t have water & Puerto Rico doesn’t have power — but sure, Donnie, tweet about Alec Baldwin. Tomorrow’s training ride is way up in a northern suburb & I have a 1 o’clock visit with Min, who lives south. So I’m definitely not going, will have to ride on my own. I sent out an e-mail about the Ride yesterday & got a couple of donations. I’m taking Monday & Tuesday off, hoping I’ll ride some then. Which reminds me: we are having the kind of weather that makes people decide to move here. (and then our 6 month long summer hits…)

Good morning, Meese! There’s nothing beautiful about this Freya’s day, with the howling winds that prevail. My daughter-in-law, a government worker, has the day off. Schools across the area are closed. The wind blew out the electricity during the night, tore off a branch of our backyard apple tree, and our neighbor texted to say that one of our shutters is in their house. She added that the wind has blown their giant trampoline into the woods. This morning when I went out to get the newspooper, tiny bits of snow blew into my face. The paper had been blown into the gutter.

Aside from all that, the news chaos is getting to us all, I think. Someone on Twitter asked wistfully, “Remember when we didn’t get six months of news in one day?” That sums it up perfectly.

Well, current temp. here in NoVa is 40 F., going up to 51 F. today. Late in the evening yesterday I made a sour cream gingerbread because I’m afraid I won’t have a working oven today. Darling Niece can’t come over to help pack because her son is home from school, so she may come on Monday.

39 windchill 33 and heading for the low 60s. Bright and sunny right now – clear enough earlier that I could gaze upon and send my love and Healing Energy out and about by a moon still full enough to call a Warrior Moon. Yesterday cleared off mid-morning and we generated 13.2 KWHs – since yesterday was the first, that’s also the m-t-d for the moment but it could double by sundown. Which would be nice. :)

Gish-gallop was the style of the 2016 election campaign and it’s the style of the R administration right now. We can protest, march, call or send cards on our “specific” issues but by the time we make the call the news cycle has moved on to something else. Part, most, of that is the corporate-owned media – they put this Administration and Congressional majority into office and they’re very vested in keeping them in power. Part of it is that there are so many pieces of good government and a free society – the Rs are attacking them all. So we need to Resist as best we can to slow them down but seriously focus on the elections. We need to get back into power – and as “wonky” as it sounds, we need to focus on voting rights as soon as we do. Once we’ve resecured the franchise there’s a lot of work in all directions but until we resecure the franchise anything we do will be undone in short order – possibly as soon as the next election – as they use voter suppression to take power back again.

Gonna visit the Villages and tour twitter a bit – by which time hopefully it will have warmed up and I can do some outside stuff. Holding the Good Thought for those in cold, wet, dangerous or potentially dangerous weather areas. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

Good morning, 42 and cloudy in Bellingham. Another night of tRump angst means another late morning wake up time. I’m getting enough sleep but I long for the day when I don’t have hours of middle of the night worries. And yes. I know I’m not the only one feeling like this!

No pool for me today because we’re going to dinner with some old friends tonight and I want to stay awake at the table. I also want to work on my sewing project. I have more pillows to cut and bias trim ready to sew. I used to zip through a pillow project now I’m slow. Oh well, it’s still creative and keeps me occupied.

It is 32 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 47. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.

I hope all meese are safe! The Nor’easter hitting the coast looks like it is leaving misery in its wake. I saw a video of a plane taking off where the wind grabbed it and moved it horizontally. JHC! Who would fly in that??!

I am shaking my head at the Republicans who are shocked SHOCKED that their leader is a stupid man with dangerous ideas. Where were you in the last 40 years? Where were you during the 2016 campaign??!?? Democrats will have to bail out our country AGAIN after the Republicans crash the economy, zero out our moral authority in the world, and destroy our environment. George W. Bush did that and President Barrack Obama had to spend his political capital to clean up the mess; President Kamala Harris will have to do the same in 2021 – we just have to hope like hell that Republicans only have the single term this time. We won’t be able to make progress if we spend the first 2 years of our administrations undoing rather than doing.

Senator Dianne Feinstein delivered the Democratic Party Weekly Address (on gun control) and I will put it up after I take a quick pass through the news. The wheels appear to be coming off the Trump White House but I am taking no pleasure in it – it is frightening to have an unhinged person with so much unchecked power finding himself increasingly isolated and angry. Stirring things up with a trade war to make the headlines about Jared and Ivanka go away? Will the next batch of bad headlines need a nuclear strike to “stir things up”? Goddess help us.

Good morning, Moosekind! At 6:49 a.m. I’m looking at a huge yellow moon sinking behind bare trees against a blue sky with only a few patchy clouds. Currently it’s 34 F. in NoVa, going up to 46 F. later. The wind is still blowing, although not as horribly as yesterday. On Friday the wind tore a limb off our backyard apple tree, blew our neighbors’ sizable outdoor trampoline clear out of their backyard, over the fence and into the woods, and tugged one of our little evergreens out of its pot on our front porch. It also blew one of our shutters off, which the neighbors kindly took into their own house. They’ll bring it back when the wind dies down.

Moreover, all the passengers, crew, and pilot threw up while landing in high winds at Dulles Airport two miles away. Wouldn’t have liked to be on that flight!

There are, of course, umpteen reasons to feel seriously disturbed this morning, and one of them is this morning’s WaPo front-page story about the six teenaged boys from four different political parties who are running for governor of Kansas. Acting on the unspoken premise that as political neophytes they can’t possibly do worse than Brownback or Thing, they’re going all out.

What disturbs me is that they’re all boys. Why isn’t a girl fired up with this idea? Do we tell girls, “Honey, you’re not beautiful enough to run for governor, so don’t even try”? Are girls so consumed with passing the college entrance exam or the color of their prom dresses they haven’t time to run for governor? It seriously bothers me that these boys think anything is possible and that Kansas girls evidently don’t.

It’s the opposite of what’s happening in Virginia, where after the women’s march in 2017 dozens of women, including the nursing mother of twins, decided to run for office. Guess what, a bunch of them won, too.

OK, that’s my little rant for the day, so now it’s back to trying to sell our excess furniture on Facebook marketplace. Wishing all a good, peaceful day. Oh, Denise, we didn’t lose power either, although usually we’re the first to do so! A guy is coming to buy our overhauled portable generator this morning. Yesterday a nice couple from Leesburg showed up with a van to buy our dining room table and six chairs. Now we gotta eat off the floor like Monty Beagle.

I am glad you are okay! The news this morning said that tree limbs killed people in Northern Virginia.

I knew about the little boys who were running for Kansas governor but I never thought about the fact that there are no little girls. It is very likely that the same thing that keeps girls out of STEM courses kept them from believing they should run for office. It is also possible that they realize that the next Kansas governor will have a gigantic mess to clean up and is leaving it for the boys! :)

41 windchill 34 heading for low 60s which it didn’t quite make yesterday. Sunny again which is wonderful – yesterday got 15.6 KWHs – highest for the day, month, and year so far! The m-t-d is 28.9 at the moment and I can see us easily topping 40 and maybe even 45 if it stays this clear.

Ebil Ones being ebil. I think Krugman was right about the surge of decency though. There are so many issues the Rs are indecent on and we are so very truly stronger together – all the different issue groups working together is pretty danged strong. We shall have to see if we can surge enough – and keep it going long enough to both get in power and stay in power long enough to anything more than clean up the mess. Folks who point to all that FDR did don’t stop and think that he had over 12 years to do it – with Truman we had the White House for 20 years – and a congress that worked with him at least half the time.

Glad everybody’s safe and there’s relatively little damage from the east coast storm. Wish we could push some of that water seriously west – like from longitude 95W at least to the Rocky Mountains if not further. Winter (indoor) Farmers Market doesn’t open until 9 so I thought I’d check in before I left. Heading out now. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

Slept in, and hit snooze several times. Now just waiting for Joy Reid’s show. Going to visit Min at 1. Since I’m taking Monday & Tuesday off, I can be leisurely about errands. Brain has been playing Book Of Your Heart, no idea why. It’s a gorgeous song — one of my U2 fan friends’ reaction to is was: “what is this sorcery??” It is absorbing, but I haven’t listened to it lately so I don’t know where it came from.

Good morning, 36 and partly sunny in Bellingham. We enjoyed dinner with old friends last night, but our conversation re how hard it is to keep old friendships in the age of tRump was sobering. RonK and I have been less social than they are so our exposure to tRump voters is more limited. We’ve lost a lot of mutual friends to illness and death the last few years as well so it was good when we focused on sharing the fun of being grand parents.

Don’t know what I will do today but I’ve got lots of choices! Time for coffee now.

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